


My heart is a memory (and there you'll always be)

by redux (sian22)



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Childhood Memories, Coping Mechanisms, Cryogenesis, Dark Imagery, Happy Ending, Healing, M/M, Mental Dissociation, Mental Powers, Trigger words, medical torture (brief memories), memories of abuse, new associations, scent as association, split identities
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-29
Updated: 2016-12-06
Packaged: 2018-08-27 18:16:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8411602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sian22/pseuds/redux
Summary: The triggers are a chain.  Forged and honed and tempered with dark intent: to bind a soldier, hold a weapon, keep back another man.  How else does one remove them except by breaking links?______________What Wanda finds when she enters Bucky’s mind and replaces the trigger words with new associations.





	1. The Thaw

_Behind us are memories_

_Beside us are friends_

_Before us are dreams_

 

 --------------------

           

This was nothing like the times before.  

For the Soldier coming up from a freeze had always been a living nightmare.  The first  few moments were always terrifying– disorientation off the dial, the growing snowstorm of returning thoughts, _what, where, how, and who-r_ eplayed in an endless loop of old jerky movietime and fast as the building staccato of his heart.   The reel would wind and rewind, stopping and stuttering until the slow trickle of awareness seeped into the parts of his brain that had not been wiped.  

Then would come the pain.   The burn and sting of sensation returning to his frozen nerves; the bite of none-too-gently pulled ports and caths.  Lingering electric jerks and bursts of muscles contracted and not released.  The ever present ache of a shoulder taxed forever by its load.  

After weeks (months? years? eons?) without sound the process was always insanely loud.  An ominous clanking and whir of machinery.  The high pitched whine of pumps and servo motors.   Teeth chattering in the bloodied foul plastic of the guard.  Demands loud and short and sharp as the crack of any rifle.  

And underneath: softer and yet more sinister, slow footsteps and a hated litany of words.    

Добро пожаловать обратно , солдат.   Вы готовы начать? *

This time it was just a quiet single word.

“Buck.”  

He opens his eyes.  

The microphone that lets him talk to the doctors and technicians filters in an almost excited quiet;  reverent, quivering, lingering below the steady hum of pumps as the fog of sublimation is whisked away.  

He blinks.    There are fingers splayed on the chamber glass. The room is dimmed to protect his eyes but he can still see quite plainly. White walls and benches reflect a gentle glow–starlight from the soft jungle night and a bank of blinking monitors.   A smile of sunshine beams and puppy eagerness to break through any fog.  

 _Said I’d be here,_ say cobalt eyes to his anxious own and he wants to say he knows, _he knows_ , but still it is hard to put aside a lifetime of experience.  

Unthawing had never pleasant until now.  

The hatch slides down.  Sure hands undo the straps and he is carried, very very gently, to a bed.  No one moves quickly.  No one speaks loudly. There are just quiet questions and murmurs of reassurance.   As he lays down, wonder of wonders, warmed blankets are draped across his shakiness.

For a moment his brain is so confused he tenses.  This must be some sort of ploy.  Ease and a simulacra of caring to break him down.  Make him putty before the whip lash of correction.  

He starts to frantically push bait away but then another odd thing occurs-a note, a musical one.   The technician is humming and then singing a low and sweet swaying tune in words he does not understand.    

She pulls up the blanket and sets it against his cheek.   _Warmth.  Kindness._ _You’re allowed this Buck._. he thinks.   It is a revelation.   

There is a brief blip of concern as a warning chime sounds.  His shaking fingers have thrown off the pulse-ox sensor and the system hilariously thinks he’s failing.  

“Apologies, Sergeant,” says a nurse, placing a reassuring hand upon his arm.  Does she think he’s worried?  Anxious that it might hurt?   He wants to laugh, it is his body being difficult after all, but at first all he can manage is a garbled scratchy cough.   There is no pain.  The intravenous drips something that sets a scent of almond in his throat and blunts the static building in his limbs.  

He floats..lets words and readings and fussing swirl around while an ice chip soothes his mouth.   Soon enough, blond and blue, a beacon amongst the white and dark, steps near.  

“Hey…”   _His_  voice is  thin, a recognizable facsimile of skinny Steve, worried but trying bravely not to show and most definitely not hoarse from endless screaming before the freeze.  Steve has raised his massive palm and he too wants to clasp it…for the warmth and sense of anchoring but his hand is busy with an IV port.

For a moment he forgets the left is gone and tries to grasp;   It succeeds in only shifting his shoulder up.   “When is it?”  

“Nine.”   Steve’s fingers wrap ever so gently around his middle finger.  “Night, but early enough.  Last call is hours away yet.”  

 _Oh sure._   _Taunt a guy._   He doesn’t have the energy to swat.  Withering eyebrows will have to do.  “Not that. What month is it?”  

“November. Thanksgiving’s coming soon.”  

November. Wakandan spring had just begun when they had landed.  The highlands had been wreathed in mist and the air at night still cool.  His skin, starved for sensation and a sink for every climb of degree, revels in the now humid air of the room.  Outside a night bird calls.  

They have unthawed him-early.

A slow smile spreads across his now pinker cheeks..  

It must mean that Stevie has found a plan.  


	2. Preparation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky learns how the triggers will be removed and Steve frets over something he can't hit.

“Are you _sure_ you’re sure about it?”

Bucky sighs expressively, blows off steam like a wonky radiator and presses his thumb and forefinger against his forehead.    _Are you fucking kidding me pal?_   It’s Ground Hog day.  Again.   The same words- the same argument all over for what-the fifth, sixth time?  It didn’t work in the hours after they had first landed when it was going under cryo and it won’t work now.  Nothing’s changed except his arm.  And his mental state.  The former is no longer a fried mess of painful shorting ends; the latter is oddly considerably soothed by three months of just being _off_.  Enough to cut his friend some slack.

He counts to three and intercepts the offer before it can come.    “I’m sure.”   

Five of them sit around an expanse of dark inlaid wood on day two after his awakening.  The detritus of a typical Wakandan breakfast is scattered across the table top: tea and mandazi, sweet bread and three types of fragrant fruit.  He’s had a bit of each, they’re all good but not quite so good as the cup of thick black coffee with a small mountain of sugar that lies warm beneath his remaining hand.   Thawed out fingers crave the warmth just as his body needed the blissfully heated blankets, the endless hot shower to remove the contact gel.  It’s a luxury to be warm.  And fed.  He grabs a fifth pastry before he has time to change his mind. 

Outside, the early morning’s mist has burned quickly off.  Fish eagles caw and hunt for breakfast of their own, circling lazily on a green humidity that is the signature of the Mvuli-the short rains of November that lash against the glass.  T’Challa, ever the gracious host, has given his newest guest the honoured seat to his right.  Wanda sits, bright-eyed, relaxed, impossibly at ease after a brief tour of the facility.  She has exclaimed softly over the sumptuous and gem-coloured, comfortable accommodation provided for her (nothing grey; nothing to remind her of the Raft), declined a nap before they meet.   The flight from Montenegro is long, its bustling city on the sea lacks a major airport hub but also conveniently lacks an extradition treaty.

If living in her fourth home in one short year bothers her the poised young woman does not let it show.

“You will rest some days Miss Maximoff, before the attempt?”  T’Challa asks, smoothly diverting the flow of conversation away from the large blond bundle of nerves across to  his left.  Wanda has just explained the how.  The tracing of conditioned memories into his cortex, sifting through a million electric interfaces to find _the_ one, replacing rigid, triggered neural interfaces with new.  When Steve had rubbed his shivering back and confirmed they’d found a way Bucky had just assumed it was some psychiatric reconditioning. Not the enigmatic skills of a barely-no-longer teen in a long flowing crimson dress.  He smiles.  Wanda’s auburn hair is pinned up for once in deference to the climate.  It makes her look older but fools exactly no one as to enormity of the task.

In a funny way Bucky likes the idea of being cured by someone who has had to choose another way. 

“There is no need,” Wanda replies, painted nails curling tighter around a delicately painted tea cup emblazoned with scarlet ibis birds.  “I am ready whenever Bucky is.”     

All eyes turn to him.   It’s a relief.  If Wanda is good to get straight to work then Bucky is is absolutely fine with that.  She has explained how keeping up her energy will be important if the effort proves refractory or long.   T’Challa and Dr. Sesanne confirm there is provision for this, everything from feeding them both through intravenous drip to stopping and starting to allow them both some rest.  Nothing stands in the way of his release.    

Except his best friend’s sudden case of nerves.  God knows Bucky doesn’t want to cause Steve any pain but jesus he just wants this _done_.

Wanda calmly pours herself another cup as Steve frowns and waves off her offer of more tea.  An obdurate flush burns down his cheeks and throat. “I don’t like it.”   

“I know.”  A sweet, untroubled smile flashes across a heart-shaped elfin face.  Steve fidgets with his napkin.  Bucky can’t tell if he’s more concerned by the risk to him or her. Likely it’s both of them.  Steve’s overexpressed dad gene has clearly expanded to include another orphan in the flock. He frowns.  That stiff, small downturn of lips would on anyone else be a sign he’s pissed.  Not Steve.  When he’s pissed he smiles. 

“Wanda, it’s my fault.  Maybe I shouldn’t have brought you here.” 

“Of course you should have.  I cannot do it from so far away.”   

T’Challa just barely smothers his chuckle with a cough.

How had Steve morphed in two scant days from his ebullient, enthusiastic self to this?   Buck is hard pressed to sort it out.  It’s not that he doesn’t trust and respect Wanda’s power- he does, they all do- and her confidence in her skills is reassuring, if a little startling in one so young.  Perhaps waking up in another century makes someone wary, conditioned for unpleasant, sideways surprises and now he’s had time to overthink?  Perhaps it is that this is something intangible, difficult for her to explain and the young punk from Brooklyn’s back alleys has always had an innate lack of trust in foes he can’t smash with his own two hands.  If the triggers were chain for a T-Rex Steve “Fight Me”  Rogers would have already found a way..

Bucky roughly clears his throat.  “The book is not gone.”   Nope, and neither is the more proximate if equally predictable threat.  Ross.  He does not say the name but catches a flicker of storm cloud in ocean blue.  Of the two _he’d_ rather deal with a judgemental, obsessive man.   And though the others- Steve, Sam, even T’challa for all he had no history or reason- seem certain Buck is not so likely to lose himself in IT again, they would not be the ones to feel the body slam of guilt/fear/regret if so much as another hair on someone’s head was hurt.   

Pretty simple when you get down to it.  He can not trust himself.  And needs to be safe within his mind.

“No it is not, although I dispute the risk of you ever hearing those words again.”  T’Challa, a grounded and measured presence, does not argue too very much. Or only at least as much he expected.  Wakanda’s king frowns thoughtfully across steepled fingers as if trying to unpack what makes him tick.  “Sergeant you are doing well. Adjusting admirably.  All the therapists have said as much and there is the evidence of our own eyes.  We can keep you safe here.”  

Sesanne, the chief neurologist and steadiest doctor he’s ever met, removes his glasses and lays them tiredly on the table top.  The man considers it a personal failure that no more conventional solution has been found.  “Perhaps if there was more time…”

“No,” Bucky replies flatly, impatient with any hesitation.  “I’m not going back under.   We have a solution and I’m not waiting any longer. ”   

There’s a pained noise from off to his left.  “But..” 

 _What the fuck Rogers?!_   It was Steve’s own idea to bring Wanda in he wants to argue but then he catches two frozen, faint lines between blond brows, lip bitten white.  It’s an  expression he’s seen only once before—at Sarah’s too-quiet bedside.  Shit.  He's being dense.  Steve finds this _hard_.  He’d only just found Bucky before his friend had to be put away again and now he would be far happier to just watch his back and keep him hid forever.  

Avoid any pain or risk. 

But they both know that’s not the way life truly works.

T’Challa smiles sadly.  “Steven your concern for your friend is admirable, but you must have faith.  He needs to be at peace.  Comfortable in his own skin.”  He turns back to look straight at Buck.  “To do this must be his choice…”

_Unstatement of the year pal._

 He nods.  

“When do you choose?”

He pushes the empty plate away.  “Now.” 

Across the table Steve plucks at a thread on the cuff of his blue jacket. 

It doesn’t stand a chance. 


	3. Chapter 3

There are, Wanda finds, two seasons in Bucky’s mind.

She has been inside the electric noise of a man’s inner soul before.  Pietro’s always.  A quicksilver space of bright fey laughter and clear white fire; strong and steadfast as she knew him in this world.  Thor’s once, for she could not control his upper mind and had to reach deep to grasp anything at all.   Tony’s-- so ridiculously easy to infiltrate as his defense was light as tissue paper.   It only served to show her how much he _cared_.  

In the real world, the corporal world of coffee and clicking pens and the steady slow drip of nutrients, Bucky lies back upon a clean white bed.  He is staring-wide and glassy-  unseeing- at the ceiling.  Wanda bends just slightly forward.  Her fingers are _alert_..they touch lightly at his temples, the barest ruby fire licking down her wrists.  She tries to move in small and subtle ways—a toe, an elbow- for it is not quick or fluid travelling through someone’s unconsciousness.  In time even her eyelids will become stiff.   

Behind her stand exactly four Djora Milaje, one doctor and one black-clad King.  The Milaje are armed of course, as is the bespectacled young doctor with enough tranquilizer to stop one of the elephants that trumpet in the forest.   All of them are silently and comfortingly formidable.   (Steve would have hovered, equally silent but far from comforting, at her elbow but he has been banished from the room.)

In the world of Bucky’s mind, she steps, lightly,  silently, into an almost forgotten and certainly not Wakandan chill. 

Her mind self shivers.  She pulls longingly at the red coat that in truth lies discarded in the breakfast room and squints into the mist.   

The pathway to _Him_ \- the true gateway to Bucky and not just the jumble of his surface thoughts- is indistinct.  She frowns.  It should be easy to find, she is not unfamiliar with the usual tempest of waking dreams, and yet it is not so.  This landscape is too-- solid. 

All around lie square, neat boxes.  White and hard, and obviously a maze.  Some stacked.  Some precariously perched and tilting crazily as if hastily erected.   They remind her nothing so much as a child’s broken castle built of blocks.  Or an icefall on a glacier.

Wanda rises up on tiptoe and shivers again as her hands seek purchase on the chill of the first bleached, bone-white tier.  She needs to get a better look at the way beyond.   Through the gap, a greyish ribbon of mirror glass winds away, snaking between the piles, tone on tone with the grey mist and her uncertainty.   How will she find Bucky if she cannot discern the way?

 “Bucky!”  Her voice rings into the silence,  echoing eerily and she listens but there is no reply.   

 Small strong hands push at the topmost block.  It tumbles--not lightly as if made of card or plastic- but heavily, as if filled with something more.  _How strange._   With a still harder shove at its now crumpled corner she squeezes past and sets foot, very very carefully, onto the path. 

 “Bucky!” 

 At each cry there is no reply.  Twice she finds a blocked dead end, three times she climbs the towers to find the silver ribbon once again.  How long this takes is far from clear but there is a shift; a lightening in the somber mist.  It becomes thinner, diaphanous and insubstantial, more like a sigh than the grey veil of another realm.    

Wanda calls again--louder this time and using all the air from deep inside her chest.  The sound must tear a veil in truth for the landscape suddenly dissolves and the shock that ripples through her very bones almost brings tears to her eyes.

She has no words for the type of winter that she finds.

In Sokovia snow at the mountains’ foot is soft:  a day’s dusting of icing sugar under bright sun or evening street lamps before it melts, becomes a wet and messy slush.  Mixed with grey granite grit and the sleet that too often falls.   This is not that snow.

 Winter in Bucky’s mind is hard.   Chill white covers the flats and rolling slopes like a deep and heavy cloak.  Wind swept, it lies swirled into twisted cornices, packed solidly upon the ground into a pavement so cold that it squeaks when she takes a step.  Even the few withered trees are painted white with frost.    _Tundra._    A Finnish word for the high and bleak, empty spaces of the northern world. 

  _Djavola._    Where is she?   Is this Bucky’s world?  Every living thing seems tucked back in to sleep the winter through but then an eerie popping noise rises above the wind.  The white mounds first taken for tufts of hardened snow are ptarmigan and crows.  Perched sphinx-like in the branches. There blank gazes are unsettling. Where is Bucky?  Is he caught somewhere in this space of always winter?  Her task to search has just become so more difficult.  With others the thread that she would travel had always been but a stride.  She had not planned on searching through hostile terrain.

Breathing deep, Wanda catches the sharp, brittle-crisp scent of snow but also the barest hint of muddiness.  That mix of puddle and earthy soil, leaf litter and moldy fern that heralds the rise of spring.  She cups her hands around her eyes and squints into the white.   Away in the distance, a City, light and shining, hovers on an island, its buildings jumbled about like the blocks.  Skyscrapers stand, basement exposed to sky, as if they had just fallen from the sky. 

Could he be there, caught in some mixed-up childhood memory?  

From far off, deeper, she can _feel_ a patch of spring.  And with it: hope.  Quickly, before she can regret the drain, Wanda winds energy like a skein of yarn and flings it hard;   sends a tendril of thought flying away into the City depths, searching for a piece of cockiness.  Some essential bit of him.   

It catches nothing.

_Not there._   Slim shoulders droop dejectedly.  She had been so certain she had the skills for this task but now a sliver of doubt creeps in with the worry.  What if something is too damaged in Bucky’s mind?  What if Hydra has used some hidden power to lock up his consciousness beyond her reach? 

Fatigue and a feeling of heaviness steals across her limbs.  Irritated, she shakes her head, trying to focus once again.  A shadow, tenebrous and grey, falls across her path.   Disappointment made real, she thinks.  

 But then it moves.

 “Кто ты”

“Oh!”   She flinches, startled.   A figure in black mask and body armor looms over her.  A rifle hangs from one black-clad hand and hard flint eyes shine like twin barrels of a gun.   This apparition is thinner than the man who lies below her fingertips, more like a feral hunting dog- all angled cheekbones and coiled lean muscle.  Dark boots do not move but there is decided air of restlessness….  

And a red star painted on bright silver metal. 

The Winter Solider.   

_Saint Peter of the Gates.    (_ She wants to laugh.Religion is not something a young woman changed by alien magic cleaves hard on to.  But its oaths remain satisfying.)   

“What do you here?”   

“I am helping Bucky, ” Wanda replies when the Soldier speaks again.  His breath does not gust into the chill air like hers.  Gelid. Crystalline.  She would bind him but oddly she finds this encouraging.  Time has not unraveled Bucky’s identity.  It is still split from that of the ceaseless fighter before her.  The Soldier’s mind self would not be cold as ice otherwise.  He should not do her harm but still…   All the more reason to treat this honestly.   “Can you show me where to find him?”

“Da.”    

The Soldier turns and walks onward through the snow, away from the broken City. 

Wanda gathers her courage like a cloak and follows. 

Snow and frost paint the ground in thinner sheets and the trees soon turn to silver.   By the bank of a iced over stream the currents of Bucky’s consciousness form themselves into a myriad, silent and white tiny battlefields.  The corpses - men, women, even children ( _oh Bucky, no_ )- are from decades since before she was born.  They sport bell bottom pants and go-go boots.   Dark suits with wide floral ties.  Mini-skirts and jeans. 

_None of them are soldiers_ , she realizes, hand on mouth, striving to hold back a cry of pain.    

“I remember every one….”   

Wanda jumps at the hoarse, gravel-pitted voice.    _Do not count._   _Do not count,_ she reminds herself.It is not for her to have that knowledge.    

Past the last white and bloodless figure the Winter Soldier turns.  The fields have given way to a deserted, snow-dusted road that wends its way up into a pine tree-studded slope.  From the flat evenness of its powder it must be dirt.  The trees are tall and droop heavily underneath their load of ice.  Like tired shoppers sagging on market day.  

“Do you know…?”   Her question comes out surer than she feels. 

A barrel, the blackened steel extension of another metal’s grip, raises and points up into the trees.   “That way.  Вверх.”

Wanda swallows nervously.  It feels ridiculous to be afraid of a forest’s murky green when one has been following the world’s most fabled assassin but there it is.  Amongst the few true memories of her мајка are quiet words--bedtime stories that include many tales of Grimm. 

She is about take a steadying deeper breath when a flicker of movement shakes the heavy boughs. 

A form approaches slowly, watching its footsteps, lifting bare feet high of the wet and unruly ground. 

“Bucky?”  

It is a boy-- a child she thinks at first-- but then he crosses the distance between them faster than she thinks possible.  As he draws near and brushes snow from off the fine cornsilk hair that frames slightly hollowed cheeks she sees that, despite his stature, he carries the careworn face of a younger man.  His face, Bucky’s face, is almost gaunt and pale even against a white shirt that has seen better days.   He fairer than she would have thought but then often children are.    

Above it all blue eyes blaze truth fiercely as any meteor. 

“Hello, Wanda.”   The youthful voice is just a breath and the tone is very grave,

“You know me?”  she asks, relieved.  The James Barnes of his youth might not know this woman who has drifted into his world.  It would make things very much easier for her to be accepted in.

“Yes. You have come to help.”   With a nod he extends his small hand.  She smiles.   _A man out of time._  His shirt sleeves are rolled up.  The light khaki pants and old-fashioned suspenders remind her of old men, rheumy-eyed and ringed by pigeons, playing checkers in Kovika square.  ( _Played_ , she thinks with a pang of guilt, for the stones and nodding plum trees are now gone.)

“Come,” Bucky says,  tugging gently at her sleeve.  “I know where _He_ is….”

_He?_ Does that mean his adult self?Wanda turns and bites her lip, squints up into the lazy swirling flakes of snow that fall across the path.  “But where, James?” 

At her back the ghost of a weapon lingers.  The young one seems entirely unfazed by the silent brooding bulk.  He shakes his head, laces his fingers into her own and  encourages her to move.   “This way.  Do not worry.  I’ve been watching over him.   I can find the path even with this storm.”   

The bones of his hand, cool beneath her own delicate, beringed fingers, are bird-like and just as small and frail.  Was he sick?  Is this the young man hobbled by pneumonia that Zola injected in a dingy bricked up basement?   

It seems impolite to ask but then Bucky looks up wonderingly at her hesitation and a knowledge she did not expect flows from eyes of entirely the wrong colour.  Not the blue of seaglass or waves over pebbles at a river’s mouth but the deeper heart of the ocean warm with life.   

It is not Him. 

“Who are you?”  she whispers.

The young man glances first to the sentinel who pads behind, brows furrowed.  Through his hand Wanda can feel the pulse that flutters at his throat, wild and stuttering.  Perhaps he does not like to say?   But then the proud chin comes up—he has to look up to catch her gaze – and the pale face shines with certainty. 

 “I am Steve.  His strength…”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Djavola. Serbian/Slovakian Hell or a variation therein  
> “Кто ты” Russian Who are you?  
> Вверх Up  
> Мајка Mother
> 
> Apolgoies for the crude Google Translate. 
> 
> Come find me on Tumblr where I am sian22redux

**Author's Note:**

> my crappy Russian translation....  
> * Welcome back, soldier. Are you ready to start?
> 
> For those who know I come to Marvel from the Lord of the Rings fandom yes indeed you detect a whif of the Houses of Healing and The Vale in here :) And also most importantly the influence of Dernhelm's wonderful "Chronicle of Scars-Cuts" Her fic planted the plot bunny. 
> 
> Come find me on tumbler where I am sian22redux


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